Re: [PATCH] paginate output of configure --help

[Eric Blake]

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According to William Pursell on 10/11/2008 10:27 AM:
> This may be a controversial patch, but I think that
> of all the times I have ever run configure --help
> without appending "|less" it was either because I
> piped the output through more or because I forgot
> to paginate completely.

Thanks for the idea; however, I'm not inclined to apply it.  Even if we
were to make autoconf output paged, we should do it consistently for all
output, not just --help.  If you always want to paginate, then you can
write a simple shell script wrapper or alias, which has the benefit of
working with existing configure scripts.  Besides, adding automatic paging
to configure would make autoconf behave different from other GNU tools,
which assume that if you want a pager, you will do the pipe yourself
(consider how long 'ls --help' is).

Furthermore, your patch still has some portability problems.  For example,
'test "$PAGER"' is not portable if PAGER begins with a '-', and you cannot
rely on the existence of mktemp.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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